As part of our mission, Patient Advocate Foundation is committed to serve patients with chronic, life threatening and debilitating illness who encounter healthcare barriers. Natural disasters can significantly decrease a patient’s ability to access and afford needed care and treatment, and to help, we have gathered these additional resources and notices for patients in areas hit by a recent disaster.

Meet PAF

Jean G. Ford, M.D.

Dr. Ford currently serves as Director of the Johns Hopkins Center to Reduce Cancer Disparities. He also serves as Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg of Public Health, with joint appointments in the departments of Medicine and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He received his undergraduate and medical degree from Columbia University in New York. He completed residency training in internal medicine at Harlem Hospital, and received fellowship training in pulmonary medicine at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He also pursued coursework in epidemiology at the Columbia School of Public Health. Following his training, he served as an attending physician, and eventually as Chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Harlem Hospital, with academic appointments in the Department of Medicine and in the school of Public Health at Columbia University. He conducts community-based participatory research, to understand determinants of cancer-related health care disparities, and to develop intervention strategies. He has also written extensively on determinants of participation of underrepresented populations in clinical trials, and published numerous articles on determinants of respiratory diseases, especially asthma and cancer. He has received multiple major grant awards from the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.